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elplatt | MIT Center for Civic Media

elplatt

Edward is a Civic Technology Programmer at the Center for Civic Media. He creates and maintains digital tools for enabling civic engagement and media participation.

Prior to joining the Center, Edward worked as a consultant on web development and civic technology projects in Detroit, MI. He is also a cofounder of the i3 Detroit hackerspace, and the lead developer of the Seltzer CRM hackerspace management tool. His other interests include technology-based art, machine learning, and neuroscience. Edward holds bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and Physics from MIT and a master's degree in Applied Math from the University of Waterloo.

In 2011, Occupy Wall Street held huge demonstrations in New York’s Zuccotti Park and around the world. But within months, many media outlets had proclaimed that the movement had entirely disappeared. But when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, many of the same participants in OWS organized Occupy Sandy to pick up the slack where FEMA fell short. The connections formed by OWS and later tapped to create Occupy Sandy show how decentralized networks can used to quickly organize effective responses.

For those of us who work with data, we get used to visualizing in our mind and develop an intuition for it. For everyone else, data visualization usually takes the form of a diagram on a small, two-dimensional screen. Standard data plots can take an exciting idea and turn it into something boring, or even worse, drudge up memories of panicked high school math exams. This experimental data sculpture attempts to draw the viewer into the visualization and connect them with the data on an intuitive, physical level. The sculpture shows the amount of coverage the U.S. mainstream media gave to Net Neutrality between January 2014 and April 2015, while the FCC was creating revised Net Neutrality rules. Each of the 33 panes of clear acrylic represents a two-week time slice, with the size of an etched circle corresponding to the amount of coverage. The top row shows total Net Neutrality coverage, with the other three rows representing coverage of "innovation," "discrimination," and "regulation," in reference to Net Neutrality.

Live notes from a lunch talk by Andrew Keen. Notes by Ed Platt and Ali Hashmi.

Ethan introduces Andrew as a former silicon valley entrepreneur, then historian. He’s since focused on understanding the culture of silicon valley.

Andrew set out to write about the history of the Internet. Although the book is called “The Internet is Not the Answer,” he thinks it needs to be the answer. In the book, he concludes that so far the Internet is not the ‘answer’ and that the digital revolution is not doing what it expected it to do. He suggests that “The Internet” can’t be described as a single entity. Rather he sees the beginning of a “Networked Age.” Since at least 1995, it’s been common to hear that “it’s too early” to make conclusions about the Internet. He argues that we can.

Jeff has many years making and participating and makerspaces. He's had both successes and failures he'd like to share with us. He sees makerspaces as a big category that includes things like fab labs, grant-funded community spaces, member-run hackerspaces, and commercial/hierarchical groups like TechShop.

When Jeff first started, he tried to do it alone to keep things cheap. He blames his gray hairs on this and suggests working with others. He admires the model used by Maker Works in Ann Arbor, MI. He wishes he'd gone to something like the makerspace bootcamp they offer before he had started.

Live notes from the Citizens Rising event at MIT on Friday, Sept 19, 2014.

Introduction

Daniel Miller opens. Next, Daniel Wong speaks. He worked as a designer in 2009. Bad news about the economy and the government weighed on him. His sister introduced him to Lessig's work and he got involved with Rootstrikers, attended meetings, led meetings. But then he got a new job, and activism fell by the wayside, until he came across an article on Gilens's work suggesting that the US government operates as an oligarchy. He introduces Martin Gilens.

Martin Gilens

Gilens opens by showing us "the most unsettling line in American politics." He continues to explain that the near-horizontal slope of the line is the significant part. It represents the probability of a policy to be adopted as a function of how popular it is with the American people. The most popular policies are virtually no more likely than the least popular. His results suggest that the views of Americans have very little influence on US policy.